At Singlebrook, we’ve brought together a team of exceptionally great programmers. Tech talent is in increasingly high demand, so it’s no easy task to recruit, screen and finally hire employees who will meet the high technical standards our clients are accustomed too. Add to it finding the right cultural fit, which for us means someone who is deeply passionate about programming, as well as committed to our social and environmental mission of Technology for Change, and you’ll find that a well-honed strategy is needed to keep the qualified candidates coming.

Here we’ve compiled the best of our hiring tips into a blog article that we hope will be useful when contemplating how to handle the search for developers.

Recruitment

In an industry such as custom web and mobile application development, where highly-skilled technical workers are in high demand, it’s smart to approach the job ad and the careers page on your website as a marketing piece. Instead of a bureaucratic-looking human resources document, let the first impression your company makes on potential employees be one that draws them in and sells them on your company’s brand.

While this approach to the job ad can lead to over-the-top promises of programmers being treated as rock stars, you do want to emphasize what you are willing to do for your team to make the workplace as productive and comfortable as possible. Do you offer a flexible schedule? Company-paid game time every Friday? Opportunities to create innovative web and mobile products that are helping the world? These are just some of the perks Singlebrook highlights on our careers page and job ads. Think about what your company can offer, and stay true to your brand while making that known to potential hires.

A key hiring strategy question to consider is, naturally, where to focus your recruitment efforts? A list of job boards is included at the end of this post, but also consider more in-depth recruiting at universities, targeting online developer forums and groups, and networking within your local tech community.

Posting a job ad to the main job boards at universities (especially local or regional schools with strong Engineering, Computer Science or Information Science programs) is a great first step. Don’t stop there! Contacting key professors in these programs, staff in the alumni departments, and internship coordinators to ask for help spreading the word about your job openings can increase your chances of finding top students that are soon to be entering the workforce. Mentoring, guest-lecturing for a relevant class, judging at student startup weekends, and reaching out to student engineering clubs are all great ways to gain recognition with students.

Think about the technologies that you list as skills and requirements for the job. Then think about where programmers with these skills are already hanging out online to get answers to technical questions and share their expertise and open source projects with others. There are many technology-specific niche communities online for Ruby on Rails programmers, Drupal programmers, etc. Github is a popular social source control platform for both open source and private projects used by developers working with many different technologies. Post on these boards where appropriate and engage in conversation with the community.

Networking face-to-face is one of the most effective ways to meet programmers that may already be familiar with your company or with other programmers on your team. Local tech meetup groups, hackathons and startup weekends are great places to find talented programmers who are passionate about coding. Singlebrook hosts a twice-monthly meetup group, Ithaca Web People, where developers and designers can meet for a beer, hack on personal or collaborative projects and present on topics of interest to others in the community.

Free places to post job ads:

Craigslist
LinkedIn Groups
Ruby on Rails Job Board
Drupal Job Board / Drupal Groups (regional, Women in Drupal, etc.)
Progressive Exchange (PX) Listserve
JobScore (posts to multiple job boards)

Places to post job ads for a fee*:

GitHub ($450)
37Signals ($400)
Careers 2.0 by Stack Overflow ($350)
Smashing ($225)
Dice ($495)
TechCareers ($350)
Girls in Tech ($150)
Mashable ($199)
Authentic Jobs ($249/30 days)

*fees listed are for 30 days